As we rang in the new year, Mike and I became one of the many lucky couples who will be married this year. He gleefully shared this realization on his Facebook wall shortly after the new year dawned.
But reality kicked in the next morning. The magical date that seemed so far away when we picked it in August all of a sudden seemed awfully close. 109 days to be exact. That's about three and a half months to scratch items off the extensive to-do list that we have spent the past four months generating.
In short -- panic ensued.
According to an insert by Kayce Hazelgrove in "A Practical Wedding" book by Meg Keene, Mike and I have entered the third phase of wedding planning -- the "How the Hell?" phase in which we wonder exactly how it is going to be possible to get the wedding together in such a short amount of time.
To put it in perspective, it took us about three weeks to design, create and mail our holiday cards and they are only a fraction of the time commitment that our DIY wedding invites will have, not to mention the other "to make" items. This thought only added fuel to the fire.
Much like resolutions, Mike and I chose to approach the wedding planning as a goal. We know what needs to happen by our big day, it was just a matter of breaking it down into manageable chunks. It is our hope that the manageable chunks will make the list a bit less daunting and not quite so overwhelming.
Since loved ones were contacting us regarding specifics about the wedding day, we knew that invites were a priority. The two of us laid out a schedule to get the labor intensive craft project done by the end of the month.
In the mean time, I decided to use spare down time to work on projects that could be done a bit further out than the last moment, like the brooch bouquet and designing the program.
Each day, I jotted a "wedding item" into my to-do list, like wiring the brooches or finding three songs for our iPod list. At the end of the day, I was able to scratch an item off my daily to-do list and we were one step closer to knocking out our wedding list.
It was having a course of action that helped keep us on track on focused on the goal. It also helped that the two of us are working on the projects together. It felt more like couple bonding and less like an overwhelming task list.
So, here's to 2013 . . . and our upcoming wedding . . . one step at a time.
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